I breathed in sharply in surprise, letting the brutal press of his lips unwind me.
“Damn,” he muttered as our lips came apart and he pressed his forehead to mine. “That was…”
“Hot as fuck?” I supplied, and he smirked as I settled back in my seat and patted the Chevelle’s dash. “I figured it was about time we popped her cherry,” I joked.
Clay’s eyes narrowed on me. The glow of his inner wolf receding as his heartbeat returned to a more normal rhythm. “You mean you never...not even with Jared?”
I shook my head. “Nope.”
He chuckled softly, giving a one shoulder shrug that told me he was more than a little pleased with himself and trying to play it cool. “At least I got a first something,” he joked, but I sensed something more serious lingering beneath the surface level sentiment.
Jared had been the first one I slept with.
But, thinking back, I realized there was another first Clay and I had shared. “You were the first one to…” I let him put the pieces together, glancing down at my still throbbing core and biting my lower lip.
The first time Clay and I had done it, he’d been so insistent on making me come first. He didn’t say as much, but I got the feeling it was because he was worried he wouldn’t last more than a hot minute once he got inside me. Turned out he did just fine. First with his tongue and then with his cock. He’d gotten me twice that night.
I flushed at the memory. At how awkward we both were at first until we just gave in to our baser instincts and let our bodies do the talking. Then it was as easy as breathing. Just like it had been with Jared.
A clattering noise in the car made me jerk my attention back to the phone.
“Is it…?” I said in a breath, afraid to speak too loudly for fear Sam could somehow hear me from her end of the bug, which I gathered was absolutely ridiculous, but I couldn’t help it. Fuck, I’d make a terrible spy.
Clay hushed me and lifted the phone between us like it might spontaneously combust in his hands.
Please be her, I thought.
But also…
I hope it isn’t her.
We listened as metal gears groaned with the closing of the payphone door and a receiver was lifted. A rustling sound and the clatter of coins shoved into the metal slot blocked out all other sound except for the chirp of numbers being pressed on the dial pad.
“Breathe,” I reminded Clay in a quiet whisper, noticing how his face was going a very vivid shade of crimson. He took a breath and some of his regular tan pallor returned.
I gestured to the phone, offering to take it, but even though his hands were shaking, he shook his head.
“It’s me.” A voice that was unmistakably Sam’s filled the cab of the Chevelle, shoving out any last hope that it might’ve been someone else and ushering in the reality that she was definitely doing something she wasn’t supposed to. Now we just needed to figure out what the fuck that was.
Clay and I shared a look as someone on the other end of the call spoke. It was way too quiet for us to hear much more than the garbled drone of a male voice on the other end.
“I know, I’m sorry,” Sam said, her voice low and shaky, making me all the more confused.
“I wasn’t able to get away or else I would—”
A pause.
“I know. There’s no excuse. I’m sorry.”
Another pause, this one longer.
I nudged Clay. “Can you hear anything from the other end?”
He shook his head once, sharply.
Fuck.
“Well, they have a new meat order coming in. They’re picking it up on Friday, and I think I heard Seth say Jared was going to be the one to collect it.”
Fucking little bitch.
“I don’t know. I doubt they’ll take the backroads again after what happened. They’ll probably take the main highway and go around through Forest Grove and hike in.”
“I’m going to kill her…” Clay said in a violent whisper so low that it shook deep in my belly and sent shivers racing up my spine. A vein throbbed in his temple and he was beginning to bend the metal case around his phone.
I peeled his fingers back and took it from him, feeling sick as we continued to listen to the conversation. Praying that she would say something that could be of use to us. A name. A location. Fucking anything.
“I don’t really know about that,” Sam said after a moment. “They’re still sending out search parties, but they usually decide the routes right before, not in advance. I could try to—”
The male voice rang through the receiver in a clipped tone. It was distant, far away, but he must’ve been shouting real loud for us to be able to make out the words find out.
Something about the tone was familiar, and I immediately racked my brain, trying to place it. Could it be Forrest or Harrison? Still pissed about Ryland and looking for revenge after four fucking years? Seemed unlikely, but I would consider every option.
“I’ll try,” Sam replied, and then after a second. “I will. I promise.”
“Something isn’t right,” I muttered at the next pause, gaze flitting to Clay’s stony expression. “She sounds...scared.”
“You think someone’s forcing her to do this?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know, but she doesn’t sound like the Sam I know.”
He nodded like he agreed, but his cheekbones flared as he clenched his teeth. “Doesn’t matter,” he decided. “I don’t give a fuck if someone’s forcing her. If she were in some sort of trouble, she should have told us. She should have told me.”
He was right, so I didn’t say anything else, falling back into silence as Sam cleared her throat on the other end of the receiver.
“Okay,” she said in a sad whisper. “I’ll try to come back tomorrow after I find out more.”
Clay’s hand lifted to the door handle of the Chevelle, and I snatched his arm, holding him in place. This was not the time to fly off the goddamned handle. If he killed her, he would be sacrificing a beautiful opportunity to play this to our advantage. He was just too pissed off to see that.
“I love y—” her words were cut short and through the phone we could hear the blaring sound of a dead line wailing on the other end of her call before the solemn click of the receiver silenced it.
The door of the payphone booth clattered open and shut again, and I hit the side button on Clay’s phone to turn it off, mind racing with possibilities.
Clay tugged on his arm, trying to wrench it free of my grip. “If we leave now, we can catch up to her,” he seethed. “Looks like Jared’s going to get his wish after all.”
I shuddered at the reminder of what Jared had wanted to do to get information from Sam but composed myself again. “I have a better idea,” I told him, meeting his gaze with a rock solid resolve.
He cocked his head at me, and I licked my lips, trying to put together how best to say this so that he would go for it.
“Allie, spit it out or I’m going after her.”
“Okay,” I hissed, releasing his arm to sit back in my seat and reorganize the chaos in my skull. “We can use this. She’s definitely guilty, but we still have no idea who it is she’s working with. We don’t know where the shifters who were taken are. And we don’t know when they will strike next other than the fact that they may try to intervene with another meat order.”
I could see the gears turning behind his eyes now, too, shifting his focus away from blind rage and toward more useful thinking.
“What are you suggesting then? We just let her get away with this? Let her keep feeding whoever the fuck was on the other end of that call information that could hurt us in the hope that the next time they talk we’ll be able to figure out more?”
No. He wasn’t seeing the opportunity here.
“No. I’m suggesting we feed her information that would be useful to us. Like, say, a false lead about when and where the meat order is being picked up.”
His brow rose. “So that we can act
ually get it to camp,” he supplied, catching on.
“Yes, but also so that we can be the ones lying in wait when they walk right into the trap we set for them.”
“A Trojan horse?”
“A motherfucking Trojan horse,” I agreed with a wide grin and his brows drew together, eyes lit from within with the spark of his wolf and something like wicked delight.
“We take them out,” he supplied, chewing his bottom lip as he considered my plan and removing his hand from the door handle of the car, making me sag a little in relief that he wasn’t beyond reasoning. “Make them pay for what they’ve done.”
“All but one,” I amended. “To find out who is behind these attacks and why.”
“Sam will—”
“No.” I interrupted. “We need Sam to think we don’t know she’s against us for as long as possible. So long as she thinks she hasn’t been found out, we can use her.”
I leveled my gaze on him, thinking that he might challenge me on this, but after a beat of tense silence, his head bobbed in a grudging nod.
“Fine.”
“You think you can face her? Pretend shit’s all good?”
His jaw clenched. “Not like I have a choice.”
I brushed a hand down the length of his arm reassuringly until he looked at me. His dark hair swept low over his glowing eyes, making them appear even brighter amid the shadows.
“We’ll have blood for this,” I promised him. “When this is all over, whatever you want to do about Sam, I’ll support you.”
I didn’t add the other bit I was thinking, not wanting to voice it aloud. If he wanted her dead after we set things straight and brought home the missing pieces of our makeshift family, then I would deliver the killing blow.
I wouldn’t let him be the one to do it. If there was anything I’d learned from killing Ryland, it was that that shit never left you. I still had trouble dealing with the fact that I was the cause of the death of my sibling...and I’d unconsciously killed her in the fucking womb. Absorbed her into me.
This would be worse. Sam was his little sister. He’d grown with her as a child. Cared for her. Protected her. Killed for her.
He couldn’t be the one to do it.
His lips pressed into a hard line at the unspoken promise in my gaze before he stuffed his phone back into his pocket and faced forward. “Let’s get out of here.”
He didn’t have to tell me twice.
17
I could hardly believe the plan we put into motion was working. Sam didn’t suspect anything, though she seemed a little put off that Clay was avoiding her. I couldn’t blame him, though. Even I couldn’t stand to be falsely civilized in her presence for more than a minute or two at a time.
It was a good thing she kept mostly to herself.
“Are they there yet?” Clay asked, his nostrils flaring as he paused in his pacing of the living room floor. “They should have been there by now.”
“Give them a few more minutes,” I said, holding my hands up in a placating gesture I knew would do absolutely nothing to soothe him.
Jared’s phone pinged, and Clay and I both whipped out heads to where he leaned against the counter in the kitchen, staring down at the illuminated screen of his phone.
“They made it,” he said in an exhale, throwing a shaky hand through his tousled hair.
I almost shouted out in relief, but settled for a grin that both my guys shared. “We did it.”
We’d casually spoken about the new order pick-up date and time in front of Sam yesterday, and like a good little snitch, she fed the information to the person on the other end of the phone just after midnight last night. We were even so kind as to include our plans for a route for the return trip.
Our order was in fact not delayed by a day as we’d allowed her to think. In fact, it’d just been delivered without a hitch to Grove’s End’s hastily cleared out walk-in freezer in town. And that was where it would stay for now. We would make a trip later tonight to grab enough for a few days and smuggle it into our deep freeze in the cabin.
As far as anyone would know until we could tell them otherwise, the meat came from a last-minute trip to the K-Mart in Hillsborough.
Jared clapped Clay on the shoulder, and the big oaf nodded to his best friend with a pained smile. “Damn. I thought for a second…”
He let the sentence trail off, but we both knew what he was thinking because we were thinking it, too. He thought they were caught. That they were taken and our meat order was destroyed again.
“I told you this would work.” I couldn’t help but rub it in just a little. If I thought Clay had been hesitant to go along with my crazy idea, Jared had been even more combatant about it. He wanted to drag Sam in here by her hair and force her to talk. He didn’t think trying to outwit whoever was behind this was smart. Or safe.
Which told me that neither of them were going to like what I had to bring up next.
“Okay,” I said, getting myself back in planning mode. “We finally got some food, so that’s good, but that’s only part one of the plan.”
I slid my gaze to each of them in turn, and their grins dropped, replaced with a stoic determination to see the rest of the plan through to completion.
Clay sat heavily in the armchair, and Jared leaned against the wall just behind him, folding his arms over his chest and putting his tan biceps on display.
I closed the distance between us, easily lifting the couch from its bottom ledge and dragging it closer to where they waited. We needed to speak quietly. It wasn’t just Sam we had to worry about overhearing; until we figured this out, no one else could know what was happening.
“Part two,” I started, pressing my callused fingers together in front of my face. “We know they’re going to try to head off the jeep on the way back from Portland.”
“We’ll do it like we talked about,” Jared continued. “Turn the Jeep into a Trojan horse.”
“Jared drives. You and I coat ourselves in meat scent and hide in the back. When they attack, we’ll be ready.”
I bit my lower lip.
“I think we should bring a few others into this,” I blurted before I could change my mind. “The last time they attacked with eight. If they have the same number, maybe more, it’ll be a hard-won fight.”
“But we’ll have the element of surprise,” Clay reminded me, but I could already feel the change in the air between us. They both knew I was right. Likely had been thinking the same thing as me. I’d risk myself, but I wouldn’t risk them.
And they’d risk themselves, but they wouldn’t risk me.
Which meant that if we were serious about doing this, we’d need help, and they would have to know what they were signing up for.
“If we tell others, we risk Sam finding out she’s been made,” Jared put in, not an argument, just stating a fact. “And if she’s going to find out anyway, then we may as well just get what we need from her.”
“No,” Clay and I growled at the same time, making Jared narrow his eyes on Clay.
“I know she’s your sister, man, but if it’s between Allie and her—”
“You don’t think I get that,” Clay snapped, looking at Jared like he didn’t even recognize him. “That’s not it.”
“Then what is it?”
“First off,” I butt in, giving them both a cutting look that said to keep their goddamned voices down. “It’s not worth the risk of losing our ability to be one step ahead. There is a chance that she could find out, but she may not, and if she doesn’t, then we can still use her.”
Jared’s face pinched, and I could tell he was holding back from saying whatever it was that fought to be set free from his lips. “And second?” he gritted out. “I’m assuming there’s something else I don’t know.”
He shot me a glare, and I tried not to take it personally. He’d been stuck covering my and Clay’s asses every night here at camp when we left. I knew he was feeling left out of the loop, but his role was equally as impor
tant as the role Clay and I played when we went to listen to the bug in the Chevelle.
I made a mental note to send him with Clay next time. As much as I hated the idea of either or both of them being out there without me, it was only fair.
“Second,” I said, trying to rein in my wolf as she growled quietly within, put off from the vibe in the room. “She lied to him.”
“What?” Jared asked, frustrated and confused.
“Don’t snap at her, man,” Clay shot at Jared, and seeing them in weirdly opposite roles from normal really made my head spin.
Jared ground his teeth together before repeating himself, more calmly this time. “What do you mean?”
“Sam lied to whoever was on the other end of the call last night.” Clay was the one who answered, leaning over the front of the armchair with his finger knotted between his knees. “She was asked about the search party routes and said she didn’t know where they would be.”
I remembered that moment clearly. The both of us so confused in the car when she said that she couldn’t find out without seeming too suspicious. But we both knew that she’d been there at dinner, sitting just two seats down from Charity as she briefed Clay and a few others on this morning’s search party route.
We’d of course quietly suggested to Charity after dinner that she go the complete opposite way from which she was planning, but Sam had definitely heard.
I’d even seen her peek up at Charity halfway through, her gaze flitting back and forth over her barely touched macaroni salad as Char gave away her entire search plans.
“I think it’s because Clay was going to be with her,” I admitted, sending an apologetic glance his way.
He snorted as though that was highly unlikely, but said nothing to the contrary.
“You think she doesn’t want Clay getting hurt or taken?”
I nodded solemnly. “Either that, or she’s having second thoughts about helping whoever’s orchestrating all of this.”
Jared shoved off from the wall. “Don’t tell me you’re starting to feel bad for that lying piece of trash.”
Shifted Scars: A Wolves of Forest Grove Novel Page 15